No Vijay, it’s not what you think.

Last night at about 9 PM I thought I’d sit down and work on a new feature and try a few more interface tricks I learned. The concept is pretty simple – make bookkeeping so easy everyone on the team can do it. Hopefully through the process more projects are handled to completion by the same member of the team, there are no drops in communication between the person that sold, the person that provisioned and the person that billed the customer. It might even make people more cognizant of how money comes into the company and how through just a few more clicks we can be that much more productive. So the natural thinking process is, once the order is completed (say upgraded quota, or new ExchangeDefender account or whatever) there should be just a few more clicks to update all the accounting. It already happens on the backend, but from time to time there are questions, mistakes.. This just cuts a lot of phone calls.

This is where I pwned myself. Looking back, its almost like a self-fulfilling Dilbert strip staring me, from start to finish. I’m coming up with stupid features, I’m designing them, and at about 2 AM cursing myself for the stupid idea to do this in the first place.

First, I decided to allow the admin to create billing objects on demand.

Then, I decided that those objects shouldn’t be fixed but dynamic and buildable on demand.

Long story short, I went from a few HTML input fields and a few SQL statements to a full blown table, form, validation and query designer.

My brain hurts. I wish I was dumber, at least I wouldn’t be going to bed at 4 AM.

It’s what you’re hearing more and more these days. Rackspace is a direct competitor of ours, I have a lot of respect for their marketing and don’t have anything bad to say about them. They certainly are a leader in the hosting space.

It’s interesting to see how Rackspace came to prominence. It wasn’t through a distributed global network, it was not through a break-neck low cost hosting (as a matter of fact, they are among the most expensive), it wasn’t through any particularly innovative move - it was through service. They promised an answer on the first ring! Fanatical support!

Those things rock when everything is running ok.

They backfire when something goes wrong.

For example, one famous fish producing SPAM appliance maker sold our dumb ass customer $10,000 in equipment, most of it in warranty services and 24/7 coverage. The very first time we had a problem, the customer (let’s call him Rich for anonymity sake) called with a problem during early AM hours, the “24 hour support” guy told him that he has paged the lead engineer and will have an answer for him in the morning.

See, that’s not service. Promising 24 hour support ought to mean getting support activity around the clock. Not that the $10/hr guard on duty is answering the phones and dispatching you to queue voicemail.

Customers expect a human contact, an agent, a representative of their best interests in a large company. When that is the leading selling point - “the human” - and they don’t get a human to contact them when things go wrong, they get upset. Rightfully so, they bought a human, instead they got a PR junkie that shot a mass mail.

Marketing has to match the deliverable, no way around it.

Compounding the problem is that when our backs are against the wall, we tend to overreact. A few months ago one of our clients patched the box out of existence. The box cycled and was unbootable. Let’s call the guy Allen. Allen opened up the ticket saying his system was down and unbootable and the ticket was marked as urgent. My staff answered the ticket immediately, offering a free reimage and a restore from backup, or if Allen wanted us to work on the box and do a Windows repair, it would be $125.00 per hour for us to pursue the Windows Repair and we’d throw the prayer in for free.

Mind you, this process is there for a very good reason. When people blow up a production server, they want to be back, up and running within minutes. Maybe an hour. So we offer the recovery service for free. If they had something ultra critical that was not backed up, that must be restored to previous condition without reinstall, etc… then we can work on the box on the hourly fee and try everything we can. Business recovery and business continuity are the two different things.

Allen got pissed off. He cancelled both servers, ExchangeDefender, offsite backup, every service he had with us and I’m sure had quite a few four letter words for us too. In such situations, I don’t even bother trying to do any crisis management. We’ve betrayed the clients trust, we messed up, and keeping them on the service list is not a good idea because they just become bashers of your service. “Who do you use? Oh, I use OWN but they suck.”; But Allen was a friend, so I figured, what the heck, let me see if I can do something.

Quick guess, what do you think Allen was pissed off about? That his server went down? That we were going to charge him for the repairs?

Nope.

He was pissed off that the request was answered immediately, and that he was given only two options: reinstall or hourly.

Now, stepping back, ordinarily this guy never would have acted this way. When we see an urgent ticket pop up its equivalent of a five alarm fire - you want me to piss on it or call in the truck? You are down, you opened an urgent ticket - I will give you the best possible scenario I have!

Pretty damn good, that the staff replied right away and gave him the options we considered to be the best. But those were not the options he thought he could count on, he thought those were the only options and he had 0 recourse.

Now, we did give him a KVM, install new hardware, and CD into the system along with the media for the repairs, etc. So we definitely accommodated him, and it took a heck of a lot longer than what it would have taken us to get him back up and running. But that is what our client expected.

And the client is always right.

So when your promises don’t match your clients expectations, no matter how good you are, you “suck” by default.

The only thing that can moderate the “suck” is a human being, but human beings don’t scale and that is why the larger the organization, the less service oriented they become. If you work with a large org and their person moves.. who do you count on? Who do you look to in order to get the message?

There is one company that does this rather well (It’s gonna be cold in hell today) - quick, how many people from Apple do you know that communicate their message? That’s right, Steve Jobs. One guy. One web site. The most impressive marketing campaigns of the last decade.

Something to model I suppose. Or you could sell night guards and janitors answering phones 24/7. Your call

The face of web applications has changed quite a bit over the years and even over the past few months. The user experience, in my opinion, is getting better in a sense that its making the user think and coordinate less while interacting with the application.

Have you ever had to watch an elderly person interact with a web page? I don’t mean elderly like 100, I mean elderly as in 30. They get really close to the screen, they try to read the text, then they forget where they placed their mouse, so they try to hover over some 8pt text and a huge window pops up in their face with even smaller text and more prompts. So they reach for the mouse, move the popup window to the side, try to copy and paste and tab around.. it’s excruciating.

As much as Web 2.0 has been a change in the way the information on the web is connected and referenced, it has even more so been an evolution of design to fit the form. Traditional user interface design involved the window, the menu, the navigation and the dialog box / form popup. So when it came to the web development, we did the same. Series of onClick and window.open functions that nested together conformed to the user experience that matched the one on the desktop, virtually unchanged in over 20 years.

Web 2.0 has really put that traditional way of design to rest. I spent most of last night coding UI blocking modal containers for Shockey Monkey. Instead of a popup with a delay and prayer that the user doesn’t double click and not see the window, the user interface is blocked and active container displays a form that interacts with the backend, transparently. User only sees the information I want to collect from them, unobtrusively, until they give it to me (or cancel) they don’t get to go back. It reduces the distraction. It reduces the “Sonny, what do I click on to save, when I was your age AOL and Compuserve were the Internet, and we had no SPAM either!”

Yes, gramps, times sure have changed.

(All a part of my new SMB Books whitepaper: “Death 2.0: Guide to inciting murderous rage through blogging.”)

I’ve spent the past three days recording podcasts and really trying to build a professional system around it so that call quality is exceptional and consequently edits and delivery take a whole lot less effort. One of the most frustrating parts of podcasting is the setup. If you don’t try at all, it’s very easy. If you try, its complicated beyond belief and the costs are astronomical unless you are collecting trash from eBay.

So to help a bit with the frustration, here is my recording setup.

Core of the system is an Alesis MultiMix 8 USB mixer (sub $100) that allows for realtime mixing and volume adjustment. This is absolutely necessary as the podcasts can have multiple callers and some callers have a loud booming voice and others need an amplifier to even register a dB. The mixer bridges the VoIP interviewing system and the recording systems - laptop PC running Audigy (free) and an iRiver recorder ($20) with a line-in. Primary recording is to the laptop, the secondary output is just there as a backup “in case of Vista”

VoIP system is the other core of the podcast. It is based on Asterisk/Trixbox (Sorry Microsoft, I wanted to try ResponsePoint but seeing how I haven’t even read the manuals yet it didn’t fit into the schedule) with my cohost dialing in from his VoIP phone in the office (anonymous SIP call feature allows us to dump the call into an extension without actually establishing an extension for him on our side). For international callers we have an extension in the Asterisk box programmed in so they can use SJPhone or X-Ten lite softphones available for free - just need a headset. As a failover to that (blocked SIP calls or whatnot) there is a direct dialin number for the conference so it can be hit from a phone if the Internet connection goes down or via Skype if the recording is international.

I’m using a Samson C01U condenser mic and about $20 worth of foam padding from Home Depot. My office has wood floors, high ceilings, and nothing to absorb the echo so foam padding was a must. It rolls up quite nicely and stows away into a drawer.

The results… amazing. I only have one improvement coming up - I am sending people that will be making appearances SIP phones (Grandstream Budgetone 101). The voice quality is just spectacular when compared to POTS and the investment is $50 + shipping (3 day in USA is about $6)

Do Skype recordings still float? Not really. Yes, in 2005 when we started this, but in 2008 the expectations are for a far more professional production and frankly it shows when something is halfassed, which is why most the podcasts you see out there happen to have 6 listeners combined.

Anyhow, if your future calls for podcasting… hope this helps.

Someone said that to me yesterday. I haven’t noticed to be honest, but fair enough, here is the cause:

I blog about business in general.

Business is affected by many factors. Things like availability of funds, interest rates, foreign exchanges, stock markets, they all play a part in the course of business. Maybe not yours, but you can bet your clients may be aware of it. So in the end, it impacts you as well. Which is why it is of outmost importance to subscribe and read trade press, business journals, books, magazines that bring the very latest news from worldwide reporters. 

Truth is, nothing I have written so far is news, it has been apparent for quite some time to anyone that is following this type of stuff. Unfortunately, the process is becoming more transparent and people on the street are starting to realize that funny money is going away so the financial decisions they make suddenly are being made with a lot more due dilligence. And the more uncertainty (are we heading for a recession? When do we get out of Iraq? Will the dollar collapse? Who will be the next president) there comes more hesitation and the purchases are being deferred. While you can defer a purchase, you can’t defer debt which so many businesses are established on.

The very businesses we serve. (and get paid by)

So pardon me if the articles seem to sound like they are about politics, they are not. They are about how politics has an inflience over the economy which has an influence over my business, which has an influence over my pocket.

Vladville does not endorse a political candidate or a political party. While I hope you aren’t making your voting decision on emotional bullshit issues that people hold very personal and are subject of constant discussion while the true problems are being brushed away with no clear plan, we can all agree that politicians are corrupted crooks and liars and their promises and party affiliations mean nothing.

It’s past 6 AM and I’ve been up all night dealing with my own stupidity and losing the battle convincingly. The first one is pretty simple:

Vista

Is it just me or does Vista only allow only one active recording device at a time? In XP you could use both the Mic, Line in and any other recording device – such as a USB webcam, etc. The system was capable of processing anything that was not muted. In Vista, it seems to only focus on a single device and render all others “Unavailable” (yes, unchecked the exclusive control setting)

Asterisk

This one goes beyond stupidity all the way into me not even comprehending the very basics of what I’m trying to do. Feel free to drop some knowledge if you’ve got it.

I am trying to initiate a call from a script (not a .call stuck in the spool) using PHPAGI. Basically, it works, the call gets generated and Asterisk places the call and connection is established and that part of it works. I’m using something very simple to originate the call from the server:

$asm = new AGI_AsteriskManager();
if($asm->connect())
{

  $call = $asm->send_request(’Originate’,
         array(’Channel’=>”IAX2/provider/$number”,
                      ‘Context’=>’default’,
                ‘Exten’ => 500,
                ‘Priority’ => 1,
                      ‘Callerid’=>$number));

 $asm->disconnect();

….

So that works, I’m all good there, number is dialed, connection established, etc..

What I would like to do is wait for the remote end to answer, when they do, play a wav, ask them for input, play another wav based on that input. All of this stuff is pretty simple with the AGI interface when it is launched as an extension, but I have no idea how to control the $call and implement AGI against it. (assume I do not want to tie it to an extension in the system because the call is a small component of the larger script and I don’t want to implement the third party API inside the AGI, I want to use AGI for just this small part of notifying the answering party of something and giving them an option to do something.

As I said, pretty basic stuff.

By now you’ve surely heard the assessment of the US economy from the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke which was basically a two hour oration summed up best in these words: “We’re fucked.” Not to be outdone, Captain Chokes On Pretzels wasn’t far behind to join in by saying he plans to beg congress for more money for a stimulus package that (quoting Henry Paulson, another overcompensated banker):

“What he believes is that we’ve got to do something that is robust. It’s going to be temporary and get money into the economy quickly. It’s going to be focused on consumers, individuals, families — putting money in their pocket. And it’s going to be focused on giving businesses the incentive to hire people, to create jobs.”

Now, I hope you endulge me for a moment.

For a second, suspend your disbelief, assume that some 29 year old with a business/engineering degree from a fine school (by NCAA standards) can get into an argument with the guys that got their PhD’s in economics by writing lengthy useless papers on the economic expansion of third world kingdoms that discovered oil.

Allow me to translate what these guys are planning:

“ We have about ten months until this is no longer our problem. So, let’s do a quick fix and hope nobody notices.

Let’s give people more money back from their W2’s. $800 or $1000, whatever.. let them buy an iPhone or a Big Mac or a new TV. Americans are morons anyhow, if they see a lot of people at Walmart they’ll assume it’s all good and we rock out! Let’s hope nobody notices the big chunk of that tax break not going to create jobs, but shifting more wealth to the producing country (China) and then they’ll buy our banks and stock price goes up and nobody is the wiser.”

We suffer from the quick fix amnesia in this country, a retarded fiscal and spending policy on the government and population sides alike, that is obsessed with the instant result, get rich quick, consumer is the king mindset.

I wish I could run my business like that. But it doesn’t work like that in reality. Cash does not stimulate anything other than spending. Perhaps for the wiser crowd, it stimulates a payoff of debt, but overall the money just goes down the drain.

Here is the big picture. Stop letting retards talk about the economy. I know its a great news bit to stick a camera in the face of someone at the gas pump and let them cry about how a 200% increase in gasoline is making them weary of the economic outlook while they are towing a new 42″ HDTV in their brand new Ford Explorer, Eddy Bauer Edition, to the house they can’t afford. Really, we need to hear more from such geniuses that obviously got the economic pulse firmly within their grasp.

Thank you for your attention, and for playing along. Let’s just drop the economics now and talk shop.. for this one we don’t need to pretend, I actually run a business.

I intend to hire nobody as a result of this fix. As a matter of fact, I am more likely to focus on outsourcing the bump in the demand it may generate because you already told me this is just a quick influx that is going to end in a month. How stupid do you think I am?

Even if I were to hire someone, I would look to a temp agency with a slight premium, what kind of an idiot hires someone knowing they will be gone in a month, then fired resulting in an exponential increase to our unemployment insurance.

No way.

Meanwhile, for the labor I actually do need, I am left choosing between tweedledee and the tweedledumb with less education than the guy that plastered the drywall in my office.

What should they do

Economic program benefits are not instant. They are not a quick fix. The business that are building and growing in USA today are highly skilled, highly specialized roles / organizations. We can’t staff those. Why? Nobody can afford to go to college because since I left in 2002, the public school education cost has quadrupled in Florida. My state finances its education system through the legalized gambling (by the way, thank you for putting me through UF!) giving young people an option of getting into a get rich quick unskilled labor force of realtors, mortgage brokers, ITT flunkies and medical halfwits… instead of making it dead easy to get into college and sustain a high five or six figure salary for 30-40 years.

Is it any surprise our country and economy is going into the toilet when its in the hands of people that guide its expansion in the same way the elderly smoker in front of a slot machine does when he gets a small payoff - Ooo, 10 quarters, quick, let me put it back in and lose it all.

Update: In case it wasn’t clear enough, I hope someone in DC wakes up and says “Economic incentives need a long term return, so instead of feeding your debt-crack habit of cash back for new gadgets, we are going to give you an incentive to earn more money. Starting tomorrow, all community college education is free and you will get an incentive for completing a four year degree in a field that our country can benefit from in the long term. We’re up for a few tough years as our work force accepts that we’re in 21st century and we don’t intend to be a recycling country for cheap crap from China and only work in the consumer sector.”

iddqd

(click on the image to see at full resolution)

I wonder if I could bribe Nick’s staff to tape him reading this ticket and spewing the morning shot of Jameson.  

It’s true what they say, you just can’t get this kind of phenomenal support from India..

How about a career? Seriously. I’m calling this one “Get Behind the Brownies” – here is the deal:

Can you apologize for a subcontinent?

Can you keep on clicking Next & Finish through a wizard?

Has the masters in computer science taken you as far as the head clerk at the Barnes & Noble?

Forget about ITT.. An exciting high paying career is waiting for you at the big blue..

Uncle Mark wants you!

Really! If you are ready for a new challenge in your life, Microsoft PSS is hiring folks for the SBS squad! Still trying to fill the void of  Peter Gallaghers departure and Mark’s promotion to the Centrotanic of SMB world, Damien and Justin (pictured above) need a helping hand. Can you blog? Can you pretend to care? What if we gave you free soda?

If you’re near Dallas, check it out. Tell them I sent you, first five win a Karl Palachuk dartboard set

Yahoo! has finally jumped behind the OpenID standard and deals yet another strike at the heart of Google and Microsoft’s Hailstorm. So far the best angle I have seen on this story comes from my very good friend Dana Epp, who questions if Yahoo! is going to trust others as much as it wants others to trust it.

But this is a far bigger blow to the likes of Google and Microsoft, two companies that desperately want to control our information and our entrance to the Internet. Microsoft’s already long failed Passport was the first attempt, Google’s entry into Profiles and content sharing is the latest. Both failed, miserably, on their implementation.

Mostly because we do not trust them.

Microsoft failed because of the questionable company ethics in a climate that had every country on the planet trying to punish the big bad Microsoft. Google failed when it launched Profiles and shared feeds because Google decided to be the arbiter of who is your friend and who isn’t. Much like permission based marketing, not everyone you have an email address for is a good candidate to be contacted, much less to have data shared with.

So this is good news, in my opinion.

Every time there was a decentralized system, we won.

Every time the company was artificially given leeway to abuse their property, they did. Verisign with the SSL certificates charging $900 for domain (now even under $10), Network Solutions charging $100 per year for a domain name (now under $10 and mostly free).

Consider the areas that nobody had any ownership over. SMTP, IRC, POP, IMAP, HTTP. The companies that were given artificial control over IP did all they could to milk it and inhibit access to it. On the other hand, the open protocols and systems have lead to nothing but the growth and innovation, at all angles benefiting the bigger companies.

Kudos to Yahoo! for sticking back with the open standards, and perhaps the other big players will also understand just why they have such a large market to begin with.